How to Make Your Own Solar Panel

In this tutorial, we will show you how to make your own solar panel. In order to make your own solar panel, there are a number of things that you will need to consider.

Step One – Planning

As with everything, the best thing to do first is to make a plan. Plan out what you are trying to do, first; then plan out how you are going to do it. For this project, the intent is to create a solar panel that can use to charge a mobile charger (back-up battery) for an iPhone.

Originally, I thought about making a panel to directly hook up to the iPhone, but then I decided that it would be quite cumbersome to have to carry around all of the time. It makes more sense to me make the panel charge the mobile charger, so you can “charge on the go”, so to speak. Plus, if it’s connected straight to the phone, the phone will have to be in the sun with the panel in order to charge. Not good.

With the intent defined, the next step would be to determine how much power the panel will need to supply. Because this tutorial is intended to show you how to make a solar panel, we won’t discuss how to determine how much power you need; but if you are interested in that, check out our tutorial here. Long story short, we have decided on a 4.5 Volt, 1 Amp panel.